#BENGHAZI: 60 Minutes Catches Up A Year Late

Lara Logan and CBS 60 Minutes producer Max McClellan presented a feature on Benghazi last night. The opening sounds like the story is being taken seriously unless you consider that perhaps this isn’t being used to set the record straight, but to direct where the needle goes next. As of this report, the 60 Minute record is skipping right over Clinton and the White House.

“The events of that night have been overshadowed by misinformation, confusion and intense partisanship…” – Lara Logan, 60 Minutes: Benghazi

Logan goes on to say that there is nothing confusing to those who lived through it and that they saw it coming. I am sure they did and yet this administration that has abused the collection of data to an extreme was not abreast of it? Either way it boils down to two options with the possibility it was a combination of all of them: gross negligence or gross incompetence. Any way you dice it, it is hard to believe this administration was unaware of the dangers, much less sending no help.

“You are going to get attacked in #Benghazi,” a security official says he told Amb Stevens 3 months b/f the assault on the U.S. mission

It’s nice to see Benghazi in the main stream media — albeit a year later. The various interviews, in essence, only confirming some of what has already been said by CBS’ Sharyl Atkinson and various reporters at FOX news — That the mission was under grave threat, requests for better security sent to the State Department went unfulfilled and that people are being kept from telling their stories of what happened that night.

Lara: An extraordinary amount of pressure on the people involved not to talk. And an extraordinary amount of pressure on anyone in the government–the military side, the political side–not to say anything outside of official channels. I mean, to the point where people that we’ve known for years would call people who were no longer in their positions, and they would call someone else that we knew, and messages would be delivered like that because there couldn’t be any trail linking you directly to our story.

The administration is cracking down so hard on leakers: no one wants to put anything in writing, everybody is scared to talk over the phone, people want to meet in person–all of that makes it that much harder to investigate anything. – Source: Q&A: 60 Minutes Benghazi Investigation

Sharyl Atkinson has been on point on the Benghazi story – yet she wasn’t involved in this large scale report. I noted last month her stories are now archived on her own website. Was she involved in this ‘re-telling’ at all? A re-telling that is so free of a political agenda it doesn’t mention even once the roles played by Hillary Clinton or the President and left “98%” of what they learned on the cutting room floor:

Lara: We had to make sure we weren’t used by anyone on the Left or the Right who had a political agenda. That was our biggest concern. Journalism is not about making a case, it’s about finding the facts. In this story, you had to work really hard to find the facts and not be seduced by anybody. So, we left about 98 percent of what we learned on the floor– didn’t even report it– because unless we could substantiate it with primary sources that we truly trusted and whose motivations we trusted, then we didn’t even go there. – Source: Q&A: 60 Minutes Benghazi Investigation

Journalism isn’t about making a case, it’s about finding the facts? Then why not report all you found and let the viewer decide? Gotta wonder what was in the 98% left on the floor.

On Twitter, 60 Minutes was bolder. No mention of the blamed YouTube Video, but it’s a clear jab at it here:

Contrary to early WH statements, Benghazi was a planned, sophisticated attack by Al Qaeda against the barely protected American compound

Logan presented a new face too, “Morgan Jones” who was so worried about his safety he is using an alias yet goes on camera with no disguise whatsoever. That seemed a little weird, but Jones confirms accounts that the Libyan militia group hired to defend the compound was no good and needed to be replaced.

These were apparently Jones’ own recommendations as he was apparently the one in charge of training said militia and Jones stated that his concerns went ignored. Yet another batch of evidence that this attack could have been prevented.

This segment doesn’t directly address what happened at the White House during and after the attack. The segment, helmed by Lara Logan, focuses on what happened in Benghazi before and during the attack. It does, however, raise the question about why no military forces were sent to rescue the Americans despite the hours-long attack on the annex. Gregory Hicks, one of the whistleblowers who blew the Obama administration talking points out of the water in his testimony to Congress, still cannot understand why the US was not prepared to protect its assets in Benghazi.

This should serve as a springboard for a demand for more answers from the White House, and also from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Yes, it should. Clearly, there was ‘a difference to be made’ — and at multiple points in time both before the attack and after. Get the transcript, Candy:

A year ago, CBS News released a previously unaired clip of an interview for 60 Minutes with President Barack Obama on Sep. 12, the day after the Benghazi attack, in which the president suggests clearly that the attack on the U.S. consulate was premeditated. The interview contradicted Obama’s subsequent claims that the attack had been a response to an anti-Islam YouTube video, repeated to the public for several days.

CBS News had withheld that portion of the Sep. 12 interview until Oct. 19, choosing instead to release a portion in which Obama criticized rival Mitt Romney’s condemnation of the administration’s response to events–a repeated theme as the media helped Obama deflect responsibility. Romney had attacked the White House’s apology for the video during the attack on the Cairo embassy, not knowing of the deaths in Libya.

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About The Author

LadyLiberty1885 (A.P. Dillon) is a Conservative minded mother and wife living in the Triangle area of NC. Mrs. Dillon began writing in 2009 when she founded LadyLiberty1885. Her writing can also be found at Da Tech Guy and at Wizbang. Mrs. Dillon also write science fiction and children's novellas that are works in progress and unpublished as of yet.

Lawrence Westlake

Arguably the craziest irony here is that “60 Minute’s” remaining audience is at once so old and addled you could sit down and read them this blog and all of the items to which it cites, line by line, using a flow chart and for good measure a puppet show, and they’d still have no idea what you’re talking about. In a pure Machiavellian sense you have to give the Dem/media complex a lot of credit. They know their audience and they never take their eyes off the political endgame.

GarandFan

“Journalism is not about making a case, it’s about finding the facts.”

And when you do find those facts, they end up ‘on the cutting room floor’.

jim_m

Wow, obama lied about Benghazi, Matthew Shepherd wasn’t killed because he was gay… eventually the media gets around to telling the truth, once they have wrung as much political advantage from the BS narrative.

Dick Cheney

Matthew Shepherd has noting to do with this. Have a pretzel

jim_m

It was another example of how the media misreports things in order to push their agenda and then much later (years later in the Matthew Sheppard incident) they get around to delivering truth which was that he was killed over drugs by his sometime lover and it was not an anti-gay incident at all. The only truth in his incident was that he was murdered, otherwise the media fabricated the rest, much like with Benghazi where the MSM accepted a lie from the admin and ran with it despite abundant evidence that it was all a lie,

Dick Cheney

When you run a secret prison in some else’s country with torture, Expect violence, Why was the US in Libya to begin with?